Neither the health secretary, Andy Burnham, nor any other senior politician should think cutting £50m from public health budgets is easy to sneak under the wire without the public noticing or caring.

There is a school of political thought that suggests that while the public cares about hospital waiting lists and GP surgeries, they don't notice when health programmes on swine flu or alcohol are cut, so spending on public health can be slashed without political or public consequence.

In suggesting that millions would be cut from health promotion work to fund a new social care programme, the health secretary is floating a risky strategy, perhaps with the idea of waiting to see what reaction he gets from the health community and the public.

But this comes in a year when the UK has experienced major public health emergencies, including struggling to contain the swine flu pandemic and E coli outbreaks. Meanwhile chlamydia cases and adult obesity rates are rising and Scotland has one of the fastest growing rates of fatal liver disease in the world.

Cutting budgets on educating the public about sexually transmitted diseases might sound like a cost-free option in the politics of public opinion. But chlamydia cases rose by 150% between 1997 and 2007 and of the 77,400 people living with HIV in the UK in 2007, about a quarter were unaware of the infection.

All of this suggests this is not the moment to cut spending on educating the public on how to avoid disease or ignore the increasingly unhealthy life choices British people are making.

Money spent on health promotion reduces the number of people in hospital or seeing their GPs, cutting waiting lists, illness rates and treatment. The NHS spends £750m on drugs treating avoidable lifestyle diseases. This could be a long-term saving to the country and its budgets. Health promotion and health education might not be high in the public consciousness but it is widely known that our children have obesity problems and are not doing enough exercise. However, what isn't so well known is the health impact of alcohol consumption, especially worrying given the damage it is doing to the nation's health.

Burnham might think that providing free social care for the elderly will be popular and a vote winner, and that might well be the case, but preventive work on public health which tackles these emerging and long-term health issues in British society is important too, as he has acknowledged in the past.

Interestingly, his comments on where the cash would come from to fund social care come as public health continues to feature regularly in debates about general election policy and strategy.

The shadow health secretary, Andrew Lansley, has said the Conservatives feel so strongly about public health that they plan to rename the Department of Health, and call it the Department of Public Health.

Lansley has not yet outlined plans on health spending or any revisions of health programmes, and when asked recently which countries inspired his public health vision he didn't come up with any.

While both parties slug it out to sound like they are the champions of health and more specifically the NHS, they might do well to remember that at the time of the formation of that august institution, improving public health so that people didn't have to go to hospital or see a doctor was seen as a vital part of the long-term goal of those politicians who sought to create a healthier Britain.

A programme of prevention as well as cure improves the overall health of British society, so let's not abandon long-term health benefits for short-term politics.